Job’s reply to Bildad
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Then Job answered and said, 2 📚“Indeed I know this is true✭. But how can a man be righteous before God✭?
3 📚✭If he would dispute with him, he could not answer him one in a thousand.
4 📚He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against him, and prospered?
5 📚He removes the mountains, and they do not know. He overturns them in his anger.
6 📚He shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble.
7 📚He commands the sun, and it does not rise, and he seals off the stars.
8 📚He alone spreads out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea.
9 📚He made the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the south.
10 📚He does great things past finding out, yes, and wonders without number.
11 📚Lo and behold, he goes by me, and I do not see him; and he passes on, but I do not perceive him.
12 📚See, if he takes away, who can hinder him? Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’
13 📚If God does not withdraw his anger, the allies of the proud✭ cower beneath him.
14 📚How much less shall I answer him, and choose out my words to reason with him?
15 📚Even if I were righteous, yet I would not answer him, but I would make supplication to my judge.
16 📚If I called, and he had answered me, yet I would not believe that he would listen to my voice.
17 📚For he breaks me with a tempest, and increases my wounds without cause.
18 📚He will not allow me to take my breath, but fills me with bitterness.
19 📚If I speak of strength, see, he is strong; and if I speak of judgment, who will set a time for me to plead?
20 📚If I justified myself, my own mouth would condemn me. If I say, ‘I am blameless’, it would prove me perverse.
21 📚✭“Even if I were blameless, yet I would not know myself; I despise my life.
22 📚It is all one. Therefore I said, ‘He destroys the blameless and the wicked.
23 📚If the scourge suddenly kills, he laughs at the trial of the innocent.
24 📚The earth has been given into the hand of the wicked. He covers the faces of its judges. If not he, then who is it?’
25 📚Now my days are swifter than a runner. They flee away, they see no good.
26 📚They pass away like swift ships, like the eagle hurrying to the prey.
27 📚✭If I say, ‘I will forget my complaint; I will put off my sad face, and comfort myself’,
28 📚I am afraid of all my pains. I know that you will not hold me innocent.
29 📚If I am wicked, then why should I labour in vain?
30 📚Even if I wash myself with snow water, and cleanse my hands with soap,
31 📚Yet you will plunge me in the ditch, and my own clothes will abhor me.
32 📚✭For he is not a man like me that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment.
33 📚Nor is there anyone to arbitrate between us, that he might lay his hand on both of us.
34 📚Let him remove his rod from me, and let not his fear terrify me.
35 Then I would speak, and not fear him. But it is not so with me.